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I Call Same Seats

We were all introduced to the concept of “same seats” in childhood — you get to keep the seat you had before. That very one. Not the one next to it, or behind it, or right up next to the teacher…the same seat you started in.

Same seats is a great policy. For school busses. And classrooms. And the back of your mom’s station wagon or SUV.

Same seats is not applicable to the United States Supreme Court.

Republicans keep insisting that the seat once belonging to Antonin Scalia belongs to a conservative. To a strict constructionist. To someone just like Scalia. They were affronted that, due to Scalia’s unexpected demise, President Obama — liberal, divisive, lame duck, Kenyan-born Obama — had the opportunity to fill the now-empty chair in our nation’s highest court. Scalia died on February 13, 2016. President Obama’s term ended on January 19th, 2017. By any calculation, there was plenty of time, and a Constitutional responsibility, to try to fill the seat. Yet, we all know that Merrick Garland has never been voted on, and the seat remains vacant, splitting the court 4-4.

Now, the Republicans are happy that Trump has the opportunity to fill Scalia’s seat with another conservative. Pundits galore, and Republican politicians, have been talking for nearly a year now about how “Scalia’s seat” should be filled with another conservative…because it’s “Scalia’s seat.”Same seats is not applicable to the United States Supreme Court.

It’s a child’s game. A way of asserting dominance. Grasping for what you had and making sure no one takes it from you. As an adult, trying to call same seats in a conference room or a waiting room will, at best, get you strange looks. It’s certainly not a way to govern.

However, if you want to apply the concept of same seats, well, strict constructionist, anti-equality Scalia never should have taken Earl Warren’s seat. From 1953 to 1969, Justice Warren presided over a court that “elaborated a doctrine of fairness” in a time of vast social change. The court that, among other successes, outlawed segregation; barred racial discrimination in voting, in marriage laws, in the use of public parks, airports and bus terminals and in housing sales and rentals; extended the boundaries of free speech; ruled out compulsory religious exercises in public schools; held that federal prisoners could sue the government for injuries sustained in jail; and sustained the right to disseminate and receive birth control information.